In the ongoing saga of WKJM, today’s edition tries to answer the question, why did Hillary win Ohio and does it have anything to do with why she’ll win Indiana and Kentucky? Not one to bury the lede, let me say that WKJM’s answer is that there are a whole bunch of racists in those states.  Read more 

In what is being heralded as one of the most momentous and politically astute moves of this extended primary campaign, Hillary Clinton’s Communication Director, Howard Wolfson, has signaled that the Clinton Campaign will be withdrawing from the North Carolina contest and focusing all of their efforts on the other May 6th primary in the state of Indiana.  Read more 

In a post entitled “Reductio Ad Absurdum” Josh shows us once again that he is quite adept at ignoring the obvious when it suits his needs. He rails against Clinton supporters who point out different scenarios that make Clinton look better than Obama when it comes to the getting the Democratic nomination. Josh is upset because “[t]here’s a set of rules everyone agreed on,” and no one should talk about anything outside of those rules. Such discussions are “just silly.”

Josh brings up this as an example:  Read more 

Now that the brouhaha over the words of Reverend Wright has been completely done away with by Barack Obama’s speech, his supporters are once again clamoring for Hillary Clinton to get out of the race. We are told the only way she can win is if she manages to have a ‘coup by superdelegates.’ Those of you who are fans of the rules will note that such a coup is wholly permissible (as long as there is no associated violence).

There are many on the blogs who deem it unseemly that the will of the people would be ignored by these superdelegates (unless, say, that superdelegate was a governor from a southwestern state whose voters didn’t vote for the bloggers’ candidate of choice ). The question is what will they be looking at when making their decisions about what is best for the Democratic Party. Undoubtedly, the superdelegates will take the will of the people into account, but that is not all. Here I will focus on something else they will consider - who has the best chance of beating McCain in the Electoral College at the end of the year.

To do this I first look at the current state of polling in head to head match-ups between McCain and the two Democrats. The following two maps are drawn based on the current match-ups. These were created using 270toWin.com’s interactive map feature. The polling data used in this analysis were also found at 270toWin.com. A complete listing of this polling data is given in a table at the end of this post. The states are colored in only if the polls show a difference between the two (Clinton vs. McCain or Obama vs. McCain) of five percentage points or greater. It is certainly possible that changes of more than 5 percentage points could occur before November, but that is what I chose to use as a point for comparison.

Clinton vs. McCain

Obama vs. McCain

As can be seen, more states have aligned themselves with a candidate in the Clinton vs. McCain contest than for Obama vs. McCain. Clinton holds a >5% lead over McCain in 16 states (and the District of Columbia) which are worth a total of 215 electoral votes, while McCain leads (>5%) Clinton in 24 states worth 212 electoral votes. This leaves 10 states and 111 electoral votes ‘up for grabs.’ For Obama the lead (>5%) is in 15 states (plus DC), worth 180 electoral votes, with McCain leading (>5%) in 21 states worth 189 electoral votes. Thus they have 14 states and 169 electoral votes ‘in-play.’  Read more